I’m at home. Just got out of Pizza Hut and I have a full belly. No one around at all. Quiet, til he pulls up, and I hear Billy Joel.
The door is open before the knock. He steps in and puts his hands on his waist and looks at his feet.
“Get in the truck.”
“Sure, where are we going?”
“Gonna look at a porch.”
I looked at him and grinned. He looked up at me but didn’t smile.
I didn’t know what it was, but I went. He looked upset. He looked mad. “Where to?” I asked.
“Shut up and enjoy the ride.”
Oh, oh, oh, for the longest time
Oh, oh, oh, for the longest time
I’m that voice you’re hearing in the hall
And the greatest miracle of all
Is how I need you
And how you needed me too
That hasn’t happened for the longest time
Things are not tense. They are stretched. The rubber band holding me and Uncle Ball together is taut and the slightest sharp word, the tiniest of tugs will snap everything.
“How long before the porch, do you think?” he said. “How long before you and I can just walk away from all of it and just sit on a porch and figure it all out?”
“Not married, no kids.”
“Gotta use your dick to get kids,” he said. “You take these.” He stuffed a bag in my hands. “You can have them. You will get more use out of them than me.”
I looked in the bag and saw a few magazines. It was porn. He was making a point.
“If your pecker rots off from disuse, then no kids anyway. This will ensure that you can at least get it up when the time comes.” He shook his head. “When you decide that someone out there with a pussy deserves that pristine cock of yours.”
Way back. We drove for a long time into dark woods with dirt roads too poor for gravel branching off to God knows where. Back into the holes of Missouri, where good people live hard lives with bad people that live angry ones. We drove for about twenty minutes before we found it. Way back in the nothing and the hollers, where beasts outnumber the men. Where everyone has a gun on their lap waiting for someone to cross into their land. That was where he brought me, to a massive barn, lit up and pumping bass.
I looked for a sign but there wasn’t one. I saw a few cars in the great big patch of dirt in front of the door that served as a parking lot.
“Where are we?”
“Pricing a porch.”
If you said goodbye to me tonight
There would still be music left to write
What else could I do
First it was the noise. Not just pounding relentless bass, but screaming lyrics and hundreds of men, all GIs that had paid taxi cabs to get here. All GIs, all horny, and all howling for what was on display.
“IDs,” the bouncer said, looking suspiciously at me. He waved us in when he found out I was twenty and Uncle Ball looked around like a starving man at a buffet.
He yelled at me. “How much would it take to get you in her pussy tonight?” he said, pointing at a mildly attractive woman, nude and dancing on a stage in front of a row of horny men.
“More than you have,” I yelled back.
“Yeah, that is what I thought,” he yelled over the sound of screams and cursing, pouring bass and wailing lyrics. “Come on.”
I grabbed his arm. “Not my kind of show.”
He half turned and looked at my hand on his arm. “We are doing this. Now sit down and take this.” He slapped my stomach with a fist full of dollar bills.
I had never been in one of these places before. Had never seen anything like this before. No movie could capture the sheer lust of this place. The movies always had darkened rooms with nice tables and maybe a bar. There was always a whole group of men callous to the naked beauties around them. Not this place.
Cheap chairs, the big wooden spools that cables come on, on their sides serving as tables. Beer everywhere. Waitresses growling their way through a sea of grasping hands, and lights. The entire place was lit up. This was not a strip club like I had ever imagined before. This was an open market of sex and debauchery that I had always swore I would never find myself in.
“Here,” he pointed at the stage where two chairs sat. The stage was being danced on by a woman with a nice body and a scarred face. She was completely naked and she was not dancing as much as she was writhing.
I looked around the room, stuck, so trying to make the best of it. The most beautiful woman in the room was a lean Asian dancer still wearing a silk red bra everyone was screaming for her to take off.
“Let’s go there,” I said. The stripper looked dead at me and waved.
“No,” he said, dropping in a seat directly in front of the scarred dancer. “The ugly ones try harder.”
She blinked for a second and her dance faltered, then he pulled out a dollar bill and placed it on the stage. It was inches in front of his face and she scooted over to him and dropped before him.
“I am going over there.” I pointed to the Asian woman. I was desperate to get away from this man. The thing he had just said to that woman’s face was horrific. Now he was forcing her to flirt with him and show him her body.
“No, Goddammit. That is an oriental. Their pussies are slanted sideways. Get over here. Sit the fuck down.”
I sat as far away from the stage as I could get while still being around him, and he put his elbow on his knee and leaned in. His face was directly over the stage and I looked at his eyes.
Fury. Patient. Unreasonable fury. He wanted to break something with his dick tonight, but more than that, he wanted to force me to fuck someone. This might be the place he thought he could do that.
She planted her feet on either side of his face and bent back to hold herself up. Her womanhood was inches from his face and he looked like he wanted to spit on it.
Guardian couldn’t be here. He felt as if women were in trouble here, but he could not stand to stay in the building any longer. Shadow. Shadow was a thug but he never wanted anything like this. He had fantasies to make a hooker blush, but nothing like this. And they were just that, fantasies. Ideas that he would never tell anyone.
Shush. It was Shush that came out and watched as Uncle Ball placed dollar after dollar in front of her. She was stuck there. And he knew it. There was a bouncer right behind me watching Uncle Ball with crossed arms and a scowl.
But Ball stayed behind the rules. He never overstepped in any way except the psychological. Soon other men were begging for her time, and she moved. He looked at me and shook his head.
“Look at you. You’re fucking miserable. When you became such a fag, I will never understand.” He screwed up his face and snarled. “Dad is gone. We need real men in this family now. Get in here and do it now.”
Shush obeyed. It was what he did. He sat and he stared.
The woman saw dollars in my hand and she came over to me. Her body was creeping closer and Shush looked her in the face and put his finger to his lips. “Shhh,” he whispered. She stopped for a moment confused and looked up at the bouncer. He nodded at me and put his hand on the back of my chair.
Maybe I’ll be sorry when you’re gone
I’ll take my chances
I forgot how nice romance is
I haven’t been there for the longest time
Joe came out right before Shush started crying. He flinched and looked around.
“Are you a problem?” the bouncer yelled over the sound of the sexual rage in the room. His mouth was right by my ear. And I could feel the heat coming off of his bald head.
I looked up at him and shook my head. “Never. I don’t belong here.”
He looked at Uncle Ball and the bouncer slapped me on the left shoulder. “Keep it together, kid.” His hand was still on my chair when he bent over and yelled in my ear again. “Is he going to be a problem?”
“I don’t know,” Ronin said. “If he is, I’ll get to him before you do. You can carry him out when I’m done. But he’s a coward. I think you’re fine.”
The bouncer slapped my left shoulder again and stepped back.
“Use your fucking dollars!” Uncle Ball said.
I stood. And held my fistful of dollars over her body. She got to her knees to grab it and I leaned in close enough to shout. “Sorry.”
She winked at me and went back to him.
On the ride home, he was silent for a long time. “I should have brought more money and bought you a fuck. I would have stood there and made sure you fucking did the deed, too.”
“I will take your life if you ever try to do anything like that,” Assassin said quietly.
“Fuck you,” he muttered. He rubbed his hand on his face and snarled. “I can still smell that nasty bitch’s cunt on my face.
I looked out the window and tried to wash that memory from my mind. But it never left. No matter how many times I have saved a girl or whispered beautiful things to a girl, the words he spoke that day always come back.
Unless I’m with Bekah. Uncle Ball never shows up in our room. Never.
“What did you do to that woman at that whore house I took you to?” he snapped, turning to look at me. A deer darted out in front of the car and I yelled. He slammed on the brakes, missing the beast by a hair. The truck was stopped. The truck we drove up to Milwaukee to get. The same trip where I was Johnny Eyeballs and he was Bobbie Whoop Ass. Where he told me he wanted to kill a man. In that truck, in our truck, as the dust billowed in every direction, he turned and looked at me.
“I know you didn’t fuck her. I know you didn’t. There is a look on a man’s face once he has had a hooker. I was trying to put it there for you, but you didn’t have it when you walked out of that room.” He smacked the steering wheel. “What did you do to her? She could barely walk. Her robe was plastered to her thigh. She was shaking. What the hell did you do to her? I have been trying to figure it out for years.”
Artist stepped up, touched Ball on the right shoulder, and he relaxed. “I talked to her.”
He drove me home in quiet. Before he let me out of the truck he grabbed my arm. “I’m going to describe that bitch to Breezy when she is sucking my dick tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t divorce her. And she won’t leave.”
“You’re going to punish her for that?”
“Here, don’t forget your loot.” He tossed the bag of porn at me and I caught it.
He was gone before I got into the apartment.
He was gone long before that. I knew what he was. I knew what he had done. I was his sin eater. It would have devoured his mind and soul if he didn’t tell me these things. I was the only thing keeping him sane. And I wondered if that was a burden I could bear for much longer.
A month later I saw him again. A few times I had seen his truck at Rose’s house but I stayed away. But a month later, he came to pick me up.
He told me he had found the perfect formula for satisfying a woman every time. He only fucked women once so it would never get old. He described in great detail exactly what he did every time he seduced a girl. Then he bought me a cheeseburger with bacon on it as I realized it was mechanical now. There was no thrill in it. He was not enjoying himself any longer. Now it was all predictable.
Once I thought my innocence was gone
Now I know that happiness goes on
Jesse Teller 
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